Our nails are modified claws—modified to their advantage. When properly
cared for, they are one of the greatest personal ornaments—beginning and
ending as they do with a delicate curve, rounded on the surface,
suffused with a gentle blush, and smooth as ivory. They may also serve
as a mode of expression and index of nationality, as seen in these
remarks by Mr. E. B. Tylor: “In the Southern United States, till slavery
was done away a few years ago, the traces of Negro descent were noted
with the utmost nicety. Not only were the mixed breeds regularly classed
as mulattos, quadroons, and down to octoroons, but even where the
mixture was so slight that the untrained eye noticed nothing beyond a
brunette complexion, the intruder, who had ventured to sit down at a
public dinner-table, was called upon to show his hands, and the African
taint detected by the dark tinge at the root of the finger-nails.”
Becker remarks that among the ancient Greeks “it was considered very
unseemly to appear with nails unpared”; nor did the Greeks consider it
beneath their dignity, like the Romans, to pare their own nails.
The Greeks, being an æsthetic nation, were guided in the treatment of
their nails by the sense of beauty. Elsewhere, however, the idiotic
notion that laziness is aristocratic led to a different treatment of the
nails. Mr. Tylor, in his _Anthropology_, gives an illustration of the
hand of a Chinese ascetic whose finger-nails are five or six times as
long as his fingers. “Long finger-nails,” he remarks, “are noticed even
among ourselves as showing that the owner does no manual labour, and in
China and neighbouring countries they are allowed to grow to a monstrous
length as a symbol of nobility, ladies wearing silver cases to protect
them, or at least as a pretence that they are there.”
Useless hands, with elongated nails, reverting to a clawlike character,
as “symbols of nobility!” The study of evolution throws much sarcastic
light on the fashionable follies of mankind.